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Comment by nazgulsenpai | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a fan of Ubuntu, but this sounds a lot worse than it is. This is just about discontinuing the ISOs that contain source code. You can certainly disagree with them doing this, but my initial reaction based on the headline was that this was similar to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux announcement a few months ago when its significantly more benign.

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Seems like basically the same thing to me?

You can still rebuild RHEL from CentOS Stream sources if you know what package versions to use, it's just not all in one convenient bundle anymore. Likewise, Ubuntu seems to be getting rid of their convenient bundle.

The source ISOs aren't a convenient bundle though. Nobody uses them; everyone uses Ubuntu's sources that are published online instead, including all historical versions. Like: what build would you be trying to reproduce, anyway? The original build published with a release, or the build that you are actually using that includes recent security updates?

You can download CentOS Stream sources, yes. But you can't download RHEL sources without a Red Hat Subscription.

But RHEL (starting from version 9) is built from CentOS Stream (apart from the separate trademarks which have to be swapped). CentOS Stream sources are RHEL sources.

Not exactly. RHEL is a point in time snapshot of CentOS Stream. There's no longer exact ABI parity between CentOS and RHEL like there used to be in the past.

There is ABI parity, though. If it were any other way, RHEL couldn't be "a point in time snapshot of CentOS Stream" and still maintain a stable ABI.

The only place where it gets a little bit fuzzy are kernel modules.

The ABI for CentOS Stream can move forward while RHEL stays frozen in time at time of cutting the snapshot. Compiling/building a binary on CentOS Stream at a RHEL release + 1 may mean the binary does not run on that RHEL release.

So unless you know the exact timestamp that RHEL cut their release from CentOS Stream you no longer have the guarantee that it matches RHEL.

Whereas before CentOS WAS an exact copy of RHEL and if I compiled a binary on CentOS 8 it would work without issues on RHEL 8.

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